But no, it's just IT. How wrong I was.

Why can't you lean left on healthcare and LGBT rights, yet more right on certain economic policies and tax issues?

Plus, people have been referring to liberals as libtards since way before the alt right was a thing, and the alt right doesn't really tend to advocate for tax cuts for the rich. They are overwhelmingly racist and white nationalist but not exclusively. And really the root of the ideology is fear of what could happen to whites as a minority group, which is very paranoid and not something I'm personally concerned about, but it's not the same thing as hate. A lot of these people are also mentally ill. The "basket of deplorables" approach to dealing with them clearly did not work. We can be against everything they stand for and still be aware that they're human beings that on the whole are probably more confused than sociopathic or evil.

In another conversation on HN about the social benefits of shaming people, I'd say a possible reason "basket of deplorables" approach didn't work is because it was quickly followed by milquetoast apology. If you want an invidious recipe for political fallout, that would be it. If you're going to try and shame people effectively as a bully you have to stick with it (see Trump).

The "alt-right" are not the only ones who are guilty of this, unfortunately. This is a characteristic of the extremes of pretty much every political position or ideology.

Personally, the whole "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality of both of the mainstream political parties is what drove me to vote Libertarian last election. Johnson's campaign seemed a lot more focused on welcoming folks with differing political views (which is unsurprising, given the rather long range of libertarianism from libertarian socialism to anarcho-capitalism, and given the fact that the Libertarian Party is in no position to be alienating voters), which was very refreshing amid both Clinton and Trump basing their campaigns on how bad the other candidate is (and further on how bad the other candidate's supporters are).

The ensuing dissonance upon understanding this punishment is what encourages our low voter participation rates, as well as hyper-partisan politics, tribalism. In addition, there's a pervasive "government sucks" that contemplating a state by state change in voting law, and it would have to be state by state, seems like dark comedy. It would take a lot of political committment way beyond that of voting 3rd party to fix the problem we have in the American political system. Americans are politically lazy, content to not vote, or vote 3rd party, and suffer the inevitable result, engage in political denialism, than the critical thinking required to fix it.

The effect of closed primary elections also enhances this tribalism and discourse problem. It's maybe 8-12% of the total eligible electorate that get a presidential primary candidate the nomination for the two major parties.

Both major political parties sabotaged the Electoral College by stacking it with party loyalists rather than, you know, smart people or even contemplative people or even randomly selected citizens. We could hardly do worse choosing dead people for Electors.

A case to watch is Gill vs Whitford before the Supreme Court next year.

It's possible for both the parent post and the article to be on the right track. Wealth enables action and technology obviously enables and creates wealth.

It's also difficult to assign this to "Clintonian types" when in general the centrist side of the Democrats has been such an ardent supporter of the growth of the tech industry. They're eager to own the eneconic growth.

Well let's face it, we're all getting a huge break from the government right now in a ton of different ways, so they do get some credit for making the laws incredibly lax around here.

Even Trump's government gets credit until it screws up this sweet deal we're on. And if you wanna see how sweet it really gets, go into fintech. All your opponents with lots of cash on hand are basically operating blindfolded with both hands tied behind their back.

Regulators literally have no idea what to make of us in that space. They largely leave us alone so long as you have even semi-competent legal advice. If you have good legal advice? Well you end up recreating financial institutions in all but name and without any regulation (e.g., Digit).

> simultaneously demonize tech workers as unempathetic racists, sexists, and gentrifiers

I wanna get to the rest of your post, but I just can't leave this alone. I'm sorry to shift the focus here, but we really don't need any external help on this though, do we?

The racist part of the story has legs because folks like the "unnamed" google engineer writing screeds about how no, actually, it's the rich conservatives in the majority who are unsafe. Because tech conferences argue they're a safe space for men who's primary ideological focus for their publications is proving black people thrive under slavery. Because a constant dribble of stories like Kixeye exist to support population statistics that are... statistically unlikely by pure chance..

The sexist part of the story? Gosh maybe if our industry stopped doing so many things that enable abuse of women, the narrative might not be that we enable the abuse of women. Similarly, if we paid women more or less equally within rank and gave them equal opportunity in the workforce... This problem might exist to a much lesser degree. Uber's ripping itself apart not because some women choose to speak out; it's because the public is discovering obviously unethical and probably illegal behavior.

Tech gets special attention, I grant. It's outsized, growing fast, and is consuming and reformatting other INDUSTRIES as its primary fuel source rather than more traditional business models.

> I would definitely consider him to be part of the Democratic establishment.

This is an excellent example of a perception gap. See, I've always seen him as fringe because of his views on transgenderism, his decision that racial slurs are free speech he should exercise, etc.

Unlike, say, Clinton or Obama who've obviously changed their opinions on this subject (or decided to portray an image largely indistinguishable from someone having changed their image) Maher has continue to expand upon it. Maybe he was center-left when he started, but it's difficult to say he's on the left side of the cultural equation these days.

Some have even rolled their own internal cloud infrastructure services like mini-Azures or a mini-AWS and systems like Hadoop but using entirely custom tech, not just an instance of an open source solution. There is almost nothing going on in the big tech giants in terms of core technology development that some banks somewhere aren't also doing.

You might split hairs or come up with some technical definition to avoid classifying them in this way, but if you do you will be deluding yourself. The Banks have found that in many areas they cannot rely on external technology companies to meet their needs, so they have to meet them using internal resources and roll a lot of their own tech.

(The official story was that low skill IT jobs are sent off shore to help the bottom line. This, the official reason for a service and information economy to tech transfer its crown jewels, never made any sense. Consider that software craft is mostly learned on the job, thus gutting the entry level insures future deficits in higher levels. And further that by near universal account, outsourced software projects are technically subpar and subject to multiple rewrites. All this while entire floors at investment banks' IT departments were 'let go'.

You do the math.)

You be the judge!

1. The US Copyright Act of 1976 extended copyright from a fixed term of 28 years (with opt-in 28 year extension) to the life of the author plus 70 years.

2. The Patent Cooperation Treaty became active in 1978, making it much easier to obtain patents in multiple countries.

It would seem that IP was strengthened (both as a method of avoiding tax and suppressing competition) in the late 1970s. The deregulation of the banking industry which happened in the early 1980s seems like it would have helped also.

In other words, globalization is a huge factor that the authors of the paper don't seem to be accounting for.

In fact, after Ctrl+F'ing "foreign", I get:

>By December 2015 holdings of liquid assets by foreign subsidiaries rose to $2.4 Trillion (see Whalen and McCoy (2016)) while domestic holdings of liquid assets rose since 2008 by about $1.9 Trillion. These foreign assets increased due to a legal provision that allows Indefinitely Reinvested Foreign Earnings to be free of US income tax. Hence, $2.4 Trillion are kept abroad not out of productive needs but rather as a device to save income tax hence not necessary for productive capacity

...so maybe American companies are using IT to store wealth abroad, but maybe American companies are being taken over by foreign entities? That would explain how our trade deficit has persisted for several decades.

1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/border-adjustment-tax.as...

Remember that the problem is caused by companies abusing the system but the rules are there because honest companies need to operate.

The real solution would fix the issue while allowing honest companies to work just like they did before. The problem is that software companies are composed almost purely out of intellectual property, that is intangible and hard to really track.

The tax wasn't collected to begin with. The reason you can deduct it when buying from a local company is that they paid it. If you buy from a foreign company that hasn't paid it then you have to because they didn't. It isn't an unfairness, it's the reinstitution of fairness.

Tax manipulation doesn't change the fundamental value of labour, but IT does. It enables vastly more value to be created using less and less labour and materials, sometimes by many orders of magnitude. That's the game changing trend.

...As automation spreads, it will intensify the crises of capitalism and sharpen the conflicts among the various sections of the population, particularly between those working and those not working, those paying taxes and those not paying taxes. Out of this conflict will grow a counter-revolutionary movement made up of those from all social layers who resent the continued cost to them of maintaining these expendables but who are determined to maintain the system that creates and multiplies the number of expendables. This in turn will mobilize those who begin by recognizing the right of these displaced persons to live, and from there are forced to struggle for a society in which there are no displaced persons. //

James Boggs, _The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook_, 1962(!!)

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/amreboggs.html

Edit: plus, if everyone views it as socialism, and then they eventually get it 20 years from now, maybe that will keep them from pursuing the real thing. Although I'm getting to be a bit of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with that line of reasoning.

Another argument why some sections of the population should not have kids.

Things like this are not necessarily true; some displaced farmers moved into cities, but many did not and have been toiling away since then.

We really whitewash history

Indeed when we compare the inequality present in different industrialized nations with varying degrees of unionization, nations with stronger unions seem to have lower inequality despite experiencing an increase in automation. As stated in an IMF report [1]:

Traditional explanations for the rise of inequality in advanced economies are skill-biased technological change and globalization, which have increased the relative demand for skilled workers, benefiting top earners relative to average earners. But technology and globalization foster economic growth, and there is little policymakers can or are willing to do to reverse these trends. Moreover, while high-income countries have been similarly affected by technological change and globalization, inequality in these economies has risen at different speeds and magnitudes.

So perhaps the combination of automation together with weakened unions is responsible for inequality in industrialized nations?

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumo...

No, it isn't, because no amount of technology will solve the fundamental information problem with centralized control, which is what any socialist economy must depend on. Nor can technology fix the fundamental incentive problem with socialist government, which is that decisions affecting everyone are made by people with the least amount of stake in their outcomes.

I'm not sure you understand the information problem I meant. The information problem I meant is that, heuristically speaking, the amount of information required to make correct economic decisions goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, while the bandwidth of information channels available to any central authority only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. So there is no possible way that any central authority can receive enough information to make correct economic decisions in an economy of any significant size.

First, because the goal of corporations is to maximize profits, not to maximize people's well being. The point of socialist government (and more generally of "correct" economic decisions) is supposed to be to maximize people's well being. For example, Google is a large corporation because of economies of scale in leveraging search and other apps to capture ad revenue. It makes no profit from serving its users' needs, except indirectly. Similar remarks apply to Facebook and other tech giants.

Second, because centralization in industry is actually dependent, to a large extent, on centralization in government. Large corporations have all kinds of advantages that have nothing to do with serving customers well, and a lot to do with being able to successfully lobby lawmakers and regulators to their advantage. The tech industry is young enough that this process hasn't gone as far as it has in, for example, the US defense industry, where all of the large corporations exist only because they have optimized themselves for getting government contracts.

In other words, large corporations don't have any magical way of getting around the information problem I described, any more than large governments do. They just latch on to a source of profits that doesn't require them to actually aggregate all that information at all.

Accomplish what? If you don't mean accomplish central control over the economy, then I fail to understand what you mean by "an efficient socialist economy".

"Collective ownership" doesn't solve this problem; it makes it worse.

The only way to solve it is for everybody to own the wealth they create, and then trade. In other words, free markets. "Capitalism" might not be the right name for such a system, but that's because that word has come to mean centralized control of capital, rather than free markets.

There is no such thing. You've just reinvented the same kind of Communism that the Soviet Union ran a 70-year-plus experiment on. It doesn't work. Control of how capital is used always comes down to a small fraction of humans making the decisions.

A friend of mine says Communism arrived 100 years too early, I'd say that's an excellent way to put it.

Mass automation doesn't remove the underclass; it just makes it a non-working underclass instead of a working underclass. That is not an improvement.

> A friend of mine says Communism arrived 100 years too early, I'd say that's an excellent way to put it.

Only if you think that Communism is potentially workable. It isn't. See my response to jrs95 upthread.

How is that not an improvement? So we have a certain segment of the population that doesn't produce, when we have such a small portion of the population producing such wealth, does it really matter? This whole argument is based on the predication that everyone must "earn their keep" and in the days where the hunters would leave the village daily to kill food, that was true, but when 2 of the hunters in our village bring home enough daily to feed the entire village 10 times over, is it really relevant the contribution of the other 20 hunters? Or is it more beneficial to the village to have them doing other things that while not intrinsically valuable, could improve the lives of the other villagers, the 2 hunters included?

It's a little hyperbolic I admit, but I'd like to think that once we reach the point where less and less actual work is required that we'll branch out into other things, not simply let people who aren't working die off in the streets. Man was not made to toil daily for his meager wage and die.

But there are two things that can happen with the surplus capacity available. One is for people to, as you say, "branch out into other things"--produce things other than food, clothing, and shelter. There is a basically limitless demand for goods and services, and once one of them gets automated, people just find other things to demand that aren't automated yet. In other words, just as you say, you have people doing things that improve the lives of everyone.

The other thing that can happen with the surplus capacity available is that it gets wasted. People who find they don't need to work to make a living, do nothing that improves the lives of anyone, including their own. The best case of this is that they sit all day watching soap operas, or something like that. The worst case is that they start doing things that worsen the lives of everyone, like committing crimes.

The question is, which of the two possibilities above is the default outcome of mass automation, if mass automation actually does remove the need for the underclass to work at basic subsistence production? You seem to think it will be #1; but my money is on #2. If we want #1 to happen (and I certainly agree that #1 is vastly preferable to #2), we are going to have to give people an incentive to produce things that improve people's lives. I don't think most people will do it without such an incentive, and historically the only incentive we know works is the need to earn a living.

I would also include the arts, entertainment, service work, craftsmanship, etc. But going on...

> Yes, of course the fraction of people that need to work to produce those things will decrease with automation--that's been happening for most of human history, and has been happening a lot faster since the Industrial Revolution. In the US in the late 19th century, IIRC, something like 19 out of 20 people worked on farms. Now it's about 1 in 20.

I feel like you're conflating labor specialization, which is what happened for most of human history where machine augmentations created more and more specific jobs (instead of "farmer" you had farm hands, farm maintenance technician, agricultural technician, etc.) all of which were new, different, and usually better jobs with more education and more pay.

Automation on the other hand eliminates jobs as it goes; instead of a new tractor that enables one worker to plow many fields, an automated tractor plows fields 24 hours a day, without breaks, food, or complaints. The guy who drove the tractor has been automated; he hasn't had his labor specialized, his labor no longer exists. So now he has to find a new job which is not nearly the same as training up for a job that he got specialized to.

As to this:

> The question is, which of the two possibilities above is the default outcome of mass automation...?

The default is certainly #2. My argument is that paying people to sit at home and watch soap operas is preferable to paying them to sit in jail cells. It's also often cheaper, and more humanitarian. But the first step to getting to that kind of place is decoupling work from life, because right now the idea that someone could live off of the excess production of our society is offensive to huge numbers of people, largely because of societal norms that we are in control of, and due to leftover Red Scare.

But that destroys your argument, because these things are not automated and won't be any time soon. Automation certainly does not remove the need for humans to create works of art and entertainment, to perform services, to provide craftsmanship, etc. So if all those things are included in "produce", then there are lots of ways for humans to produce that won't be displaced by automation any time soon.

> Automation on the other hand eliminates jobs as it goes

So does labor specialization, as you call it. Machine augmentation doesn't just create "more and more specific jobs"--it eliminates the old jobs that didn't require the knowledge of how to use the machines.

Also, even if a tractor isn't automated (it requires a human driver), it still enables one human to do work that it took many humans (about 20, with the present state of farm automation in the US) to do before. All those other jobs are indeed eliminated. Historically, farm laborers whose jobs disappeared went to the cities and started working in factories or learned a trade.

> My argument is that paying people to sit at home and watch soap operas is preferable to paying them to sit in jail cells.

Agreed, but my argument is that if those are the only two choices, we're doomed. Basically, you're saying society will, in the fairly near future, end up stagnant--all important jobs will be automated and all of the humans will just sit around watching soap operas (except, perhaps, for the small number of humans who oversee the automation). And I'm saying that such a society will collapse, because the rest of the universe is not stagnant. Things are always changing, and only humans--human thought and human ingenuity--can cope with change. (And if your answer is that we'll just invent AI and automate that too, that just means we'll be at the mercy of the AI, which I don't see as a good situation.)

> the idea that someone could live off of the excess production of our society is offensive to huge numbers of people

I would put this differently. I would say that the idea that someone could receive a basic living without producing anything that improves anyone's lives is offensive to huge numbers of people. And it should be.

Its the old Protestant work ethic, which served us for a time but is rapidly becoming obsolete.

In the 1950's we wrote about how robots would remove the yoke of labor from our shoulders, let us go on to be creating and enjoy leisure. Now that it's happening, folks are panicking. Cries of "But people must work; its offensive if they have leisure!" go up on every discussion site.

Try to think outside the box. What might people accomplish if they're not required to labor at McD's for 8 hours a day?

Which is not at all what I said.

> What might people accomplish if they're not required to labor at McD's for 8 hours a day?

Lots of things, I'm sure. And as long as those things improve people's lives in some way, I'm all for it.

Up to whom? Yes, you get to decide what improves your own life. But you don't get to decide what improves someone else's life.

After the limited time I've spent in my life paying attention to this, I'm not assuming any job, including my own, is safe from automation.

> Historically, farm laborers whose jobs disappeared went to the cities and started working in factories or learned a trade.

And that is the difference, except this time the cities jobs are being automated and there's no where left to go, as even the farms don't need nearly so many people. And yes there's certainly an argument to be made for the trades which I'm sure are (mostly) safe from automation for awhile, but not forever, and there's a limited pool of people who are skilled enough to do those jobs, and even past that is a limited availability of those jobs, AND AFTER THAT is the fact that as more and more former factory workers, truck drivers, and coal miners all sign on to be plumbers, electricians, etc. all of which are needed that the supply of those workers will explode and the wage they make will therefore shrink.

> Agreed, but my argument is that if those are the only two choices, we're doomed. Basically, you're saying society will, in the fairly near future, end up stagnant--all important jobs will be automated and all of the humans will just sit around watching soap operas (except, perhaps, for the small number of humans who oversee the automation).

That't not at all what I said: I said we should have a system in place for that certain group of people who have nothing to contribute, because there's nothing wrong with that. The alternative to feeding and clothing them in their homes is to feed and clothe them in prison, and the former doesn't enrich private prisons and we don't need to pay for guards, not to mention the ethical cost involved in the current situation which is mass incarceration.

I'm saying, by virtue of being born, you should be fed, clothed, and sheltered because we can do that and the notion that we simply shouldn't so Mark Zuckerburg can have a fifth house is I'm sorry, a DISGUSTING idea to me.

> I would put this differently. I would say that the idea that someone could receive a basic living without producing anything that improves anyone's lives is offensive to huge numbers of people. And it should be.

Why is that offensive? With what we currently spend on defense, we could feed, house, and clothe every homeless person in the United States with Gucci bags, mansions and caviar. Why is it so important that we not? And if you cannot answer without citing tradition or work ethic or something equally arbitrary and archaic, then I'm sorry but I'm not convinced.

So you think things like artistic creativity, service work, craftsmanship, etc. are going to be automated soon? That there will literally be no productive things that humans can do, sometime in the not too distant future?

If that is indeed what you think, then I can see why you want some rule put in place that ensures that all humans get a basic living, uncoupled from work. But I still think that, if that's the case, humanity is doomed. See below.

> With what we currently spend on defense, we could feed, house, and clothe every homeless person in the United States with Gucci bags, mansions and caviar.

But that's not what you're talking about. You're not just talking about homeless people. You're talking about, eventually, all people. You're saying that there will come a time in the not too distant future where every single human on the planet has effectively zero productivity. And your way of preparing for this is to put a rule in place that says that humans don't have to produce anything in order to get a basic living.

One problem with this is, as I said before, change. If you haven't automated dealing with change, then any state where, for the moment, humans don't have to produce anything won't be stable.

But if you have automated dealing with change, then you're up against a bigger problem: you have basically invented AI, and there is no guarantee that the AI will care about humans. We will be at the mercy of the AI, just as other life forms on Earth today are at the mercy of humans. We will basically be zoo animals, preserved only at the sufferance of the AI. And in that situation, humanity is doomed.

Firstly you're responding as though, at some mysterious date in the future, all people are getting fired and replaced with a robot. It's not going to happen that way, it's going to be a gradual process but I think not as gradual as a lot of people want to think, and I think once it begins it will accelerate exponentially as the technology matures.

Not to mention:

> So you think things like artistic creativity, service work, craftsmanship, etc. are going to be automated soon? That there will literally be no productive things that humans can do, sometime in the not too distant future?

You're still hung up on this idea that productive things are all people can do. The whole point as pointed out by another poster is that people were supposed to not work anymore, at least in the traditional sense: that humans would give the work to the robots, and then go find other, more enriching things to do, maybe something with art or just really learning a shitload about medieval poetry. The fact that someone chooses something that isn't necessarily productive doesn't matter in the world I'm envisioning, where scarcity is no longer a thing.

> But that's not what you're talking about. You're not just talking about homeless people. You're talking about, eventually, all people. You're saying that there will come a time in the not too distant future where every single human on the planet has effectively zero productivity. And your way of preparing for this is to put a rule in place that says that humans don't have to produce anything in order to get a basic living.

I wouldn't say it's going to hit zero. There will always be something for us to do, even if it's just to hit the stars and go find new things (ala Star Trek's utopian future).

What I am saying is: We already are seeing the beginnings of a population that can't really produce anything, and we're seeing a new phenomenon; we don't really need them to. How much of the population will end up like that isn't the point; the point is that some of them are, and some are already, and we have no mechanisms to deal with that other than starving people to death which I think is not a long term solution.

> But if you have automated dealing with change, then you're up against a bigger problem: you have basically invented AI, and there is no guarantee that the AI will care about humans. We will be at the mercy of the AI, just as other life forms on Earth today are at the mercy of humans. We will basically be zoo animals, preserved only at the sufferance of the AI. And in that situation, humanity is doomed.

This is a whole different discussion but this doomsday view also relies on the AI being entirely unaware of empathy, which as a core component of humanity, would likely make its way into the artificial minds humanity creates. It's a base function of animal and human brains, it's what stops us from killing each other over basic impulses.

I have said no such thing. I am responding directly to your own statements. You said, in effect, that nobody's job is safe from automation. I just assumed you meant what you said.

> You're still hung up on this idea that productive things are all people can do.

All of the things in question are productive things, by the definition I thought we were using. A "productive" thing is a thing that improves people's lives. Are you saying that artistic creativity, service work, craftsmanship, etc. don't improve people's lives?

> There will always be something for us to do

That contradicts "no one's job is safe from automation", doesn't it?

> We already are seeing the beginnings of a population that can't really produce anything

Again, you're using a much too restrictive definition of "produce". But there's another point here as well.

The basic vision I see you describing is, nobody has to produce anything because all of the necessary production will be done by machines. But who owns the machines?

If the machines are owned by a few centralized entities, then we have the same problem of distribution that we had before--who gets the stuff the machines make? If you think there is any way of setting up a society that will guarantee that such a distribution is going to be fair to the people who don't own the machines, I have some beachfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you.

The obvious alternative is to make those machines cheap and small and plentiful enough that we can all have one. In other words, instead of universal basic income, we all are able to buy, at some reasonable price, machines that meet all of our basic needs. Then it will indeed be up to each individual person to decide what, if anything, they want to produce, because they will own all the resources necessary to meet their basic needs.

The difference between these two scenarios is that the first (yours) requires a fundamental change to human nature. I don't think that's going to happen. The second (mine) only requires a change in the kinds of technologies we try to build. That seems like a much better bet.

> this doomsday view also relies on the AI being entirely unaware of empathy, which as a core component of humanity, would likely make its way into the artificial minds humanity creates

This strikes me as overly optimistic handwaving. We have no idea how human brains implement empathy, and none of the artificial devices we have built so far have it. Yet somehow we're going to magically be able to build it into an AI?

> It's a base function of animal and human brains

Which evolved over hundreds of millions of years. I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of complexity that process created.

Your prejudices are not facts.

Sure, Moore's law and advancements in machine learning/vision push to make automation more economically viable for certain areas that were already good candidates. For other areas where human's adaptability is even moderately valuable, technology is a long ways away from coming anywhere close to beating out humans.

Technology breaking the chains of toil is a very idealistic thought. I can see technology augmenting more jobs and allowing humans to toil more efficiently, but not total automation.

How much will it cost upfront to automate a specific area and how long will it take for such automation to turn a profit vs human alternatives.

Right now:

- the upfront costs are high

- continued maintenance and update costs are uncertain

- human are really not that expensive for what they can do

My view is that humans are actually a much more valuable resource than most HN/reddit/social media users seem to think. Solutions that fail to account for the __massive__ available decision making and processing power of the ~7 billion existing humans will just not be competitive. Someone will always find a way to harness the human resource and put people to work. I just hope the people get compensated fairly and the work won't be miserable.

Fancy new technology is not of much comfort to people who back in the day could buy a house and send their kids to college with a single blue collar income-earner and now can hardly find a job (and can't even dream of sending their kids to college with their puny earnings).

>if technology makes everyone better off but increases inequality, is that a bad outcome? Why or why not?

Also, humans are not animals to just need food and shelter. For humans it's not just what you have, it's also what you have relative to others. That's why nobody in the US considers a "trailer park" person fortunate just because they don't live in a third world slum or in a cave like people did in 10.000 B.C. -- we consider their position relative to a current baseline. If that gets too out of balance, people have issues.

Who said they were "better than [me]"?

You seem to presuppose what in fact needs proving: that if someone ended richer than someone else, they were better to begin with. Except if you mean "better at getting rich" which is a tautology.

Between inheritance and class status of parents, and between connections and lucky chances (including geography and color), there are so many ways to undeservingly be more wealthy than someone else and so many ways the "starting conditions" are not the same that this is not even wrong.

Now, two types of people usually have difficulty seeing this: those that played life in 'easy mode' (well off parents, good education, etc) and can't see how it's not as easy for everybody, and people who managed to overcome bad chances and who, due to confirmation bias, can't see that the chances for what they did were slim for others in the same boat but attribute it all to their hard work and smarts (and the lack of those in others).

http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

* I dropped out of high school, got my GED

* Worked for a call center doing Verizon Wireless tech support, got customer service experience for my resume

* Worked for Support.com, got desktop support experience for my resume

* Worked on Taos' service desk, was there at the right time for a Salesforce.com Developer opening and was lucky enough that the people interviewing me decided to take a chance on me

* While working at Taos there was a co-worker in the NOC working on a little C# WinForms app that I helped out on occasion, he thought highly enough of me that he gave my information to a friend of his

* Said friend of my former co-worker decided to interview me, I've now been working at my current employer for three years and have been promoted twice

My abilities were a key component of my journey from a low-paying call center worker to a "Sr. DevOps Engineer" making twice the median household income in my area, but they wouldn't have mattered at all without a tremendous amount of luck.

If I hadn't decided to quit working at the call center to try and go to college I wouldn't have ended up working for Support.com, since I applied there over winter break as required by the state unemployment office.

If I hadn't started working at Support.com my resume may have been tossed in the bin when I applied at Taos due to having no documented desktop support experience.

If I hadn't started working at Taos when I did I wouldn't have networked with the people that led to my current employer, they got a government contract when I was leaving that required help desk personnel to get security clearance and I would have never applied in the first place. Not to mention they gave me an opportunity to prove myself as a high-school dropout with no degree, one which I probably only got because I was already an employee with positive references from others I interacted with.

I think it's easy for many people to underestimate where pure chance plays a part in their lives and careers, but I know I could have easily wound up doing menial low-paying customer service work forever without it. I merely had the means to take advantage of opportunities when they came up, but nobody gets anywhere without the opportunity to do so in the first place.

People shouldn't be left to die, because they weren't naturally blessed with an adaptability that allows them to be retrained into software engineers. There are a huge number of reasons why someone might not be able to "keep up" in todays world. To write that off as 'being better' is disgusting.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

1. Are you willing to leave behind, say, 40-50% of the population? Especially since that group could include people such as your parents or your partner or your kids.

2. If you're willing to leave them behind, what are you going to do with them?

Contrary to what other comments have suggested, welfare isn't about being a nice civilized society that doesn't leave people behind. Welfare is a bribe. It's a tribute ("danegeld"[2]) we pay to the poor so they don't burn down the city or murder anyone between them and food/shelter. Arresting that class of people would be more expensive as it still pays for their food and shelter.

Do you really want to give up the cheapest and safest option for defending yourself against the bottom ~quarter of the population? Recent events at Ferguson and Baltimor are warning. Ignoring them is not recommended if you value maintaining your current standard of living.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzl4B3mrKQE

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld

[3] Exact amount and the scope of what is mean by "national defense" is off topic.

For me, personally, a random town in Germany is more pleasant from the social aspect than San Francisco with all its riches and its hobos.

(n.b. incarcerating a criminal costs tens of thousands of dollars per year; whereas the summary execution of a deadly threat during a riot, costs at most $10 of ammunition per criminal)

If you're going to advocate for murdering the poor why not go whole hog and just herd them into camps for eradication? That would presumably be a lot more efficient since you're centralizing everything

So, to be clear, my overall point here is that bribing people from threatening deadly violence, is not as good as directly responding to such threats when and as they are made.

Come to think of it, I'm not even quite sure why you made the leap that "allow riots to occur then respond to them appropriately" means "murder all the poor people".

If >it's not OK to force everyone else to provide for them.

Along the same lines of thinking:

it's not OK to force everyone else to defend your assets/property/lifestyle

Or at least it's unlikely you will succeed in that effort

No need for such a thing; that is the job we expect of the police in exchange for paying our taxes, is it not?

> they form because the culture is broken

Have you ever actually met many poor people? "Culture" isn't the problem, and they are some of the hardest working people in the country. They are also some of the nicest people I've ever met and by far the most generous.

If you want to actually fix the problem so welfare isn't necessary, fix the things that are currently denying them the opportunity to improving their situation such as the prison-industrial complex, racist crap like "redlining", various predatory business practices, and regressive taxes. Find ways to increase labor's power such as unions or guilds, with the goal of increasing both available jobs and job stability.

> Arguably it's the welfare money that significantly led to the culture breakdown

That is pure nonsense. Seriously, try actually living[1] below the poverty line for a while, or talk to people that have had to live through a lifetime of denied opportunities.

[1] Due to an unfortunate medical situation, I currently live on less than $1500/month.

A cursory examination of the level of violent crime (particularly against property holders) in states where there is little or no welfare state compared with those in which there is a pretty comprehensive welfare state would suggest this isn't a very good argument...

Then it's the culture that needs fixing, not the welfare.

>Arguably it's the welfare money that significantly led to the culture breakdown in the first place by destroying economic and social structure.

Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, et al. have excellent welfare, but no "gangs" of that style. So it's not the welfare that causes that phenomena.

In contrast, most developing world hellholes have little to no welfare, and huge gangs, violence and destroyed economic structures issues.

In fact the "have the community provide for itself" is how you get support structures like the mafia, the cartels, etc, substituting a state that doesn't help its people.

If you want to try your hand at creating wealth without "forcing" others to provide for you, there are plenty of lawless regions in places like Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan for you to test your mettle. Sound unappealing? There you go.

They don't start out rich. So, maybe some rich people inherit their wealth, but go back enough generations and everybody had to start non-rich.

It's not just that, though. Rich people don't live in a vacuum with their wealth. They interact with the economy. They employ people, they contract for services, they trade with people. All of the people they interact with need to be fed, clothed, educated, etc. However, thanks to the power of economic growth, they still get more out of society than they pay in taxes.

For some reason people are always reluctant to follow that advice.

Not the other way around.

In fact, it's important to remember that people do actually think what you wrote. They just don't say it aloud.

It's nobody's fault that they're garbage people. Luck of the lottery.

If "we" want to provide support to any group, it can be done through charity. I'd argue this way is more moral: it's more of a good deed to be generous with one's own money than with other peoples', and it's not much of a good deed to give money if one's only doing so due to threat of imprisonment for failing to comply.

There's also research suggesting that charitable behaviour makes the givers happier too: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-012.pdf.

Charity implies voluntarily providing support, leaving it to the benevolence (or lack thereof) of each individual. In the end, it teaches people that being uncharitable is OK and an acceptable trait, just like being charitable.

I want a society that mandates that support -- and even more so, one where everybody is OK with that.

In other words, instead of pushing out the disabled, in my society I'd rather push out (as useless scum) those that don't wont want society to help the disabled.

>I'd argue this way is more moral: it's more of a good deed to be generous with one's own money than with other peoples'

Then, since everybody will be using their own money to pay the "help the disabled" tax, it's a good deed to mandate by law that everybody has to fork out.

>it's not much of a good deed to give money if one's only doing so due to threat of imprisonment for failing to comply.

That would be irrelevant if the desired outcome is to effectively help the disabled, rather than to test honesty of people's charity.

Your use of "teaches" here implies that violence/imprisonment or the threat thereof teaches (if no mandatory charity teaches people that being uncharitable is okay, I assume you mean mandatory charity through taxation teaches people to be charitable?). That certainly isn't a given; how do you know whether people have been taught to be charitable by the threat of violence/imprisonment vs they're only paying taxes to avoid being imprisoned? If you beat a child for swearing, has the child learned that swearing is bad, or or has the child just learned to avoid swearing in front of the parent to avoid beating? I'd argue that one thing it definitely teaches is that violence is an acceptable means of making others do what you want, and to me a person who believes this is far more terrible than a person who's just too cheapskate to give charitably. Millions more people have been killed in the past century by people using violence to compel others and people supporting such ideas (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Hitler and their armies, even the politicians who forced people into the army via the draft) than have been killed from neglect (the 20th century war & genocide death toll far outstrips the death toll from starvation).

>Then, since everybody will be using their own money to pay the "help the disabled" tax, it's a good deed to mandate by law that everybody has to fork out.

Is a good deed a good deed if done unwillingly?

>That would be irrelevant if the desired outcome is to effectively help the disabled, rather than to test honesty of people's charity.

If people are free to donate as they choose and none chose to support the disabled, wouldn't that in fact show that society doesn't really care about helping the disabled anyway? In which case what's the justification for a law forcing something that few in society want? Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?

It's not about knowing what each individual motives are though, it's about society setting X (we help the disabled) as a norm, rather as something that one may or may not decide to do.

In the end, some people might not like it, but more people will see it as a default/norm/baseline than in an opt-in society.

>Is a good deed a good deed if done unwillingly?

Yes, since again, the good is not in what it means for the one doing it, but in the good it does to the one receiving it.

>If people are free to donate as they choose and none chose to support the disabled, wouldn't that in fact show that society doesn't really care about helping the disabled anyway?

Yes, but there's nothing fatalistic about how a society "feels" (statistically) and what it cares about. Societies can be changed, and having helping as the default (and someone can always opt-in to help more), helps in establishing that kind of "help is good" change in my opinion.

>In which case what's the justification for a law forcing something that few in society want?

Well, what if few, including the black votes, (say, 10% of the 80% whites + 20% of blacks, so 70 vs 30) wanted the blacks to be free?

I would still justify such a law that goes again what the majority wants. Who gets to decide in general in such cases? That's a tricky question, but if it was up to my to decide, I'd decide in favor of that in that case.

>Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?

Well, there's nothing stopping them to do so on top of state and structural assistance.

This is a supposition. I could suppose that (and I've certainly read this somewhere) actively giving to charity encourage people to give more; giving is like a skill, generosity is like a muscle, growing with practice. If giving is abstracted out to the state, if people think "I don't have to give to charity, my taxes give enough", people are deprived of that development. Who's supposition is more correct? I don't know, but it's not something that can be decided based on theory alone.

>Well, what if few, including the black votes, (say, 10% of the 80% whites + 20% of blacks, so 70 vs 30) wanted the blacks to be free?

>I would still justify such a law that goes again what the majority wants. Who gets to decide in general in such cases? That's a tricky question, but if it was up to my to decide, I'd decide in favor of that in that case.

The difference here is, if you have a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others, there'd be no mechanism for keeping people in slavery. A society rejecting violence in the absolute sense would barely even support notions of property, yet alone slavery. The difference stems from the fact that neglect is a passive harm; if the person doing the neglect didn't exist, the neglectee wouldn't be in a better situation. If the man watching the downing man didn't exist, the drowning man isn't more likely to be saved. Violence is an active harm: if the person doing the violence didn't exist, the victim would be better off (at least from the victim's perspective); if the slaver didn't exist, the slave would be better off.

>Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?

>Well, there's nothing stopping them to do so on top of state and structural assistance.

And people do give quite a lot. According to https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2016/, Americans gave 373 billion in 2015. With a lower tax burden, people would have even more to give. https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/discretionary_s... shows that in 2015, 54% of American government spending was military spending. Do you think if individuals had more choice over precisely how to spend that money, they'd put so much into the military?

Slavery is based on using force to have others do your work, serve your interests -- not in enforcing certain beliefs in others. So it's not enough to have a "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", but also to have a society that it or individuals also don't use force to serve their private interests.

While looks unlikely. How would such a society would enforce no slavery if people still profited from having slaves? It should punish those that do to prevent that (and thus it couldn't fully embrace the non-violence thing).

>(A society rejecting violence in the absolute sense would barely even support notions of property, yet alone slavery.*

Is such a society possible? Only if it has everybody's agreement (not to be violent, use violence when it suits them, etc). Else the society would have to use violence itself (that is, some kind of police) to maintain the non-violence in its members.

>The difference stems from the fact that neglect is a passive harm; if the person doing the neglect didn't exist, the neglectee wouldn't be in a better situation. If the man watching the downing man didn't exist, the drowning man isn't more likely to be saved. Violence is an active harm: if the person doing the violence didn't exist, the victim would be better off (at least from the victim's perspective); if the slaver didn't exist, the slave would be better off.

Well, if the "man watching the drowning man" was punished for his non-involvement, then future drowning men would be better off. So it might seem like it's a totally passive harm, but it actually affects the future of what's acceptable.

(Not to mention that the drowning man, assuming he eventually managed to escape, would probably rejoice in seeing the "man watching him" getting punished for not trying to help him).

>While looks unlikely. How would such a society would enforce no slavery if people still profited from having slaves? It should punish those that do to prevent that (and thus it couldn't fully embrace the non-violence thing).

I probably didn't make the best choice of words, but by "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", I meant a society where violence is rejected in general; slavery is the slaver enforcing their beliefs on how the slave should behave on the slave, and they have to use violence for this, or else the slave would escape.

You're right though that maybe this would only work if every member in the society agreed not to use violence. There could be alternatives though, e.g. ostracising the violent person - if nobody else in society interacted with them, they'd starve. Or building a literal wall around the community and not letting the violent person in. Allowing people some degree of violence in direct self defence, e.g. restraining the violent person and pushing them out of the community.

>Well, if the "man watching the drowning man" was punished for his non-involvement, then future drowning men would be better off. So it might seem like it's a totally passive harm, but it actually affects the future of what's acceptable.

This only works if there's somebody who sees the person letting the drowning man drown (and if there's somebody else there, why didn't they save the drowning man themselves?). Even then there's no guarantee: maybe if such a law existed against not helping downing people, people who didn't like helping others would just stay away from rivers more, to reduce their chance of ever being in that situation in the first place.

Amen to that.

I was merely taking the original comment to one of its logical conclusion. Seems like there are those who would like to bring back charitable almshouses and asylums to replace state institutions, how quaint but also how despicable.

After all: If you can't keep up (even if you're disabled), that's not other people's fault for being better than you.

It's funny. Propertiarians frequently use the argument against Socialism that it's "human nature" to be greedy, while simultaneously relegating social support to charity, supposedly out of the goodness of human hearts :)

I believe that utility is logarithmic with rate of expenditure. Hence doubling your spending rate gets you a constant increment in utility. This is why we measure pay rises in percent rather than absolute value. Another $100/week would make a huge difference to someone on the breadline, but is lost in the noise for a millionaire.

This means that money transferred from a rich person to a poor person will increase utility, because the decrement in the rich person's utility is more than outweighed by the incremenent in the poor person's utility. This difference can also accomodate the transaction costs (i.e. running the IRS) and the "deadweight cost" of decreasing the rich person's incentive to earn more.

This would seem to suggest that money should be redistributed so that everyone has the same amount, as that would maximise utility if the total amount of money is constant. But of course that condition isn't true: in a world with zero economic incentives there would be no economic activity. In reality of course such a world would go horribly wrong in any number of ways.

So there would seem to be an optimum amount of inequality in a society. Too little, and you destroy incentives to create new stuff, thereby making everyone poorer than they would have been. Too much and you are wasting valuable resources on gold plated baths that would be better spent giving poor people a tolerable standard of living, education, health care etc.

In other words, if there were no way to reduce inequality without reversing the gains that everybody made, then reducing inequality in that situation would be harmful.

At the low end, at some point you can afford to have a roof over your head, and an extra $20 might mean that you're eating much better for a whole week, or you can buy new shoes, or whatever. But if you're homeless, $20 won't feed you for very long or get you out of the rain for very long.

At the mid range, a salary bump from $30k to $50k might make a world of difference if you're trying to raise a family. It might mean that you're not worrying about how you're going to pay for groceries, or it might mean that your kids are always wearing reasonable, well-fitting clothing.

A few years ago, I met a beggar at a bus stop, who said that the store across the street had a sleeping bag for 50% off until the end of the week, and he was hoping that he would be able to buy it for the winter. I didn't have much money on me myself (basically just the bus fare), but I gave him what I had and walked home instead. To him, those five-ish euros meant not freezing in his sleep, while to me, they only meant a bit of unplanned exercise.

If you have nothing at all, every little bit of money gives you access to some tangible improvement of your situation. But if you have much less than nothing, and every cent of additional income just serves to lower a gigantic debt, there isn't really much incentive to earn more when it makes no significant difference in the end. This is probably one of the reasons bankruptcy law allows discharging unpayable debts, because otherwise debtors might not be motivated to do something about the debts they could repay.

Wealth inequality is often the basis for social revolution, so you have to be careful not to let it get too out of control for too long. In relation to dead cultures who went through this process, we've only just begun the initial stages of intolerance toward it. Occupy, bernie 2017, etc have largely been unsuccessful in motivating political or even social change. This was one outcome that was considered in the formation of the Union (an eventual defacto oligarchy) that was meant to be managed by the US political process. The conflict has already been escalated by flawed judgement in the judicial (citizens united).

Capitalism attempts to distribute the wealth produced by the nation according to the value each individual (and that individual's property) contributes to the economy. There are false positives and false negatives there (people who make more money than their contribution is worth and vice versa), but that's the theory.

A fundamental assumption of that system is that almost everyone (apart from the sick or handicapped) can produce enough value to sustain themselves. Even if someone has no capital or no education, we assume that they can trade unskilled labor and that the value of that labor suffices to buy them, at least, the things they need to satisfy their most basic needs.

That assumption might become untrue in the future. If that happens, the problem won't be that we don't produce enough value to support these people, but that the current system for distributing that wealth will no longer work.

Where are you getting this from? I am aware of no such attempt. I thought that, in idealized capitalism, everyone gets as much as they are able to convince or legally force others to pay them, and 'value' produced is irrelevant.

I think this question is really just asking if inequality is bad. It seems to me that inequality is an inherent part of nature in general and the human condition in particular. "Would you really want equality, or are you ok with inequality at some level?" Another way to say equal is homogeneous. To rephrase it, "Would you want everyone to be the same, or do you value diversity instead?"

I would propose a different question. If some cause (technology in this case) has the effect of helping everyone but helps some substantially more, is this situation sustainable? Then consider, will everyone's fortunes continue to improve forever? Will some equilibrium in the inequality be established? Will the inequality eventually reach an extreme such that the situation will be worse for certain people or society as a whole?

I don't propose answers to these questions. However, I think we can look through history to find examples of how similar scenarios played out in the past.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614...

If you could demonstrate it made 'everyone' better off, I think it'd be an interesting question to consider. But I suspect many of those at the bottom ends of our actually existing inequality are not so "better off".

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf

Take a look at Greece today and see how IMF policies are working out. Actually you can take a look at the entire Southern Europe which is the end result of policies of IMF/ECB/Council, the so called Troika.

Now, with regard to inequality in the US, that's mostly self inflicted. Moving production to cheaper areas lowers prices. It just so happens that the US chooses policies that increase inequality, rather than decrease it, like how education is funded.

This is a non-sequitur that often gets touted, despite totally ignoring efforts of NGO's, improvements in technology and industrialization, as well as decolonization. Further, the majority of the world's most developed economies, e.g. China, Japan, and the US, all relied on heavy protectionism to at first foster the creation of local industry. Forcing open the economies of developing nations is a surefire way to keep them poor and totally dependent on foreign imports.

I like not having to cook over an open fire. I like having lights in the dark, a cell phone, a car, a washing machine, a table saw. Those are all luxuries and I want more of some of them.

A mud hut will not cut your lifespan. A mud hut of course implies that you don't have access to good medical care, don't have good heat, and cooking on a smokey wood fire. All of those will cut your lifespan, but it isn't the mud hut it is the rest of what it implies. In short poverty which I already said is a problem.

We can move up a step: at $5/hour (less than minimum wage in the US, but lets call the rest lost to taxes) you can potentially earn $800/month, put $600 into rent in a cheap apartment and that leaves $200 for food. You will be walking everywhere, getting clothing at goodwill, but it is enough to live to a fairly old age one (once you get old you can no longer afford your medical bills, but most people can live to old age with minimal medical care)

(Nothing against capitalism. I just think the general direction will be profit maximisation.)

https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-...

If you think about it, wouldn't more advanced technology lead to higher consumption until everybody has literally everything that they could possibly want?

Technology is more of a scapegoat for rising inequality than a proximate cause.

Bu imagine an alternative world without factories. The maker movement is still ahead of us. Imagine there exists an open-hape-wiki with 3d-models of every part of every thing we ever built (actually these models exist already but are not open source).

The shop & tools are would be a 3d-printer plus remote controlled robot arms (so that a person from Ukraine can deliver service to you).

Don't get me started on 3D printing (I have one). It has its uses, and more so (with all the hype) it doesn't have its uses.

The goal is to dis-intermediate, to enable person to person (customer & supplier) to profit from the living cos / efficiency arbitrage.

I think that unless there is a digestible version of the arguments along with the general counter arguments, it's not a very useful read. And comments are just going to be undocumented reaction to the title...

The availability of credit also corresponds to a decreased rate of rise in wages.

It's almost like the two are linked. Stop paying people more and give them loans instead.

One of my favorite surveys of income inequality is a Krugman essay from 15 years ago (before he went full political). http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/ForRicher.html

He briefly covers globalization, technology, and returns to scale for celebrities, but ultimately argues that changing social norms and the resulting drop in taxes from 1980 onward explains most of the dramatic rise in income inequality.

Also, it seems that the short period of lesser "income and wealth inequality" in US (all the other places were just poor, thus there was natural "equality") during around 195x was just a temporary aberration. Not that it wouldn't be good to repeat it, mind you.

Notably Venezuela was 4th, which seems especially sad given the recent developments there.

Just like everything, once there is an evolution, if you're out of it, you're obsolete and you matter less.

Just made me think about this article where those few indispensable engineers that get a high pay.

In a capitalist environment, technological improvement goes fast (although technology was also developed under soviet russia), and the reward gets very concentrated. Property means that innovation is not really shared, only sold.

One could endlessly talk about how IT seeds from the internet technologies being developed from DARPA and made public. Hard to say if markets really improved what DARPA developed, IMHO I'd say no.

Corporations rarely use tech to fight other Corpos. When they do the best strategy is to commoditize competitor's main market [1].

Ex1. free Google maps have killed many GIS / mapping businesses.

Ex2. Free Google Docs hurts badly MS Office (office is 33% of their revenue)

[1] Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the-financial-s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion